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Open Source Storage

After pricing storage units to provide the space we needed to backup our systems, offer file shares, and iSCSI targets we found them to all be extremely pricey. We decided to build our own storage.

We were looking for an Open source solution for storage that would fall within our budget but be resilient and reliable. We found the backblaze storage pods and saw that the hardware design was open sourced and easily obtained from 45drives.com. We purchased the storage pod, 20 3TB hard-drives and 4 SSDs of caching. We decided to go with FreeBSD 10.0 for the system and used ZFS as the file system. Using ZFS we setup a number of mirror vdevs and striped across them leaving two drive for hot spares. We used the two SSD drives for the ZIL log and two SSD drives for caching.

The following is how to setup your own storage unit after getting the hardware.

STEP 1 (Install FREEbsd on your Storage Pod):

I went with FREEbsd 10.0 on the unit, because it was the newest stable release and allowed for easy setup of ZFS on the root volume.

STEP 2 (Enable SSH for root user *optional can be a security risk):

Open /etc/ssh/sshd_config
# vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config
change the following lines:
From:
#PermitRootLogin no
PasswordAuthentication no

To:
PermitRootLogin yes
PasswordAuthentication yes

Restart ssh:
#service sshd restart

STEP 3 (Create ZFS storage pool):

Check which hard-drives are attached using the camcontrol command:

#camcontrol devlist

Once you figure out which drives you wish to add create the ZFS pool with run a command similar to the following to create the pool: